To Try
by storiewriter
Summary: In the aftermath of "Sigils and Secrets," Bentley and Dipper have a long way to go if they want to repair their relationship. A Transcendence AU fic. T for swearing.
1. Chapter 1

**A/N:** In which Philip and Alcor have a talk.

* * *

Two days after the disaster with Bentley, Alcor was summoned again. He did not fight this summoning, recognizing it as one of the two circles he had given Bentley and his father.

He wished that he _had_ resisted it when he saw the look on Philip Farkas's face and the privacy wards set up all over the room.

"What is wrong with my son?"

Alcor played with his fingers and looked anywhere but Philip's face. "He…hasn't told you?"

"No, he hasn't," Philip said. "All he told me and his friend was that it 'had to be done' and that 'there was a cult and things went south' but that 'he made it out okay.' Then he turns around and can't sleep, can't eat, has nightmares whenever he tries to shut his eyes. He can't stand to be in a dark room and I want to know what's wrong."

Alcor fidgeted. He had spent the last two days alternatively fretting over the bond between himself and Bentley and trying to ignore the pain coming from it because Bentley did not want to see him. "I think it's something he should tell you."

Philip's expression went even stonier, and he took a step forward. "Maybe. What I also want to know, however, is why you haven't done anything about it."

"Huh?" Alcor looked down at the little man. "What are you—"

"Are you really asking me that?" Philip jabbed a finger in Alcor's face, and he went cross-eyed trying to follow it. "Me, one of the best-read Alcorian scholars in my time?"

"Uh."

Philip, thankfully, moved out of Alcor's personal space and threw his hands in the air. "And even beyond that, I know how much you care for Bentley! Yes, sometimes you can't express it very well, and sometimes it moves into the bizarre and creepy, but you care for him. So why," he rounded back on Alcor, "aren't you eating his nightmares?"

Alcor pursed his lips and hunched in on himself, crossing his arms. "He said he doesn't wanna see me."

There was a sort of dumbfounded silence. When Alcor looked back up at Philip, it was to see the man dragging a hand over his face, his holographic lenses fizzing and sputtering at the interruption. "You—are you _actually_ twelve?"

Alcor frowned. "What's that supposed to mean?"

Philip pulled his hand far enough down that his eyes were visible. "Nevermind. Just…just sit down with me, will you?"

As Bentley's father collapsed back into their old couch, Alcor hesitated. Should he make a run for it? He hadn't been offered a deal to stay, and he really should insist on one just for ceremony's sake. It would also be a good excuse to get out of this awkward situation.

Then a package smacked him in the face, and he only just caught it as it fell. It was for some kind of weird cuttlefish-flavored chip, and Alcor couldn't help but raise his eyebrows at Philip.

"Those in exchange for sitting and hearing me out," the man said, looking tired. Alcor realized, suddenly, that Philip must have been sitting up with Bentley, must have been watching his child as he slept.

Slowly, Alcor opened the bag and sat down on the couch beside Philip. When the man made no move to speak, he pulled one of the chips out and put it in his mouth. It tasted odd, but not awful.

"Bentley said he didn't want to see you, right?"

He nodded and ate another chip. The urge to pull his legs up onto the couch was great, but he resisted it in an effort to not seem completely helpless.

Philip exhaled through his nose. "Okay. And you've been honoring that."

"Well, yeah," Alcor said, not realizing the snotty tone the phrase held until it was already out of his mouth. He coughed. "Um. Yeah. Of course."

The look Philip gave him seemed more appropriate of Alcor's second human father, Lio—Liondale? It didn't sound quite right, but it was close, even though not remembering made something in him ache. "That is good. But were you planning on ignoring Bentley until he called you back?"

Alcor would have gnawed on the side of his mouth if his teeth weren't so sharp. He turned away from Philip Farkas and fidgeted with the bag of chips in his hands. Eventually, he said, "He was really upset."

And it was all his fault, it was all because of his stupid inability to actually pay attention to Bentley's feelings and opinions and he _hated_ himself. The thin material of the package of chips crinkled and tore between his claws.

This time, Philip sighed and placed a hand on Alcor's shoulder. He tensed, but did nothing as Philip spoke. "Then it was good to give him space. However, if he was hurting, then you should have come back and at least asked permission to help."

Alcor scowled and shrugged Philip's hand off his shoulder. "That wouldn't help anything."

"Are you sure?"

He stuffed a handful of shredded carbon aerogel and chip crumbs in his mouth. "Yes," he said around his hand, trying to not bite himself but recognizing the odd tang of his own blood. Laughter bubbled up in his chest, and it came out in a short, high-pitched burst that rang in his ears and was too foreign and too familiar all at once.

 _See?_ He told himself, repeating that old, hated conversation. _You're just like him. You say you're not but you're just like him. You hurt everybody around you and you should stop, you should keep away from everybody so that you can't fuck them over the way you did Bentley. You're the worst you're the worst you're the worst._

Alcor was only half aware of the remains of his payment falling from his hands, of his knees being pulled up to his chest and the air beginning to thrum with the force of his emotions. _Can't even remember the names of those important to you,_ he thought. _Is this what Philip will become? What Bentley will be? Another Lionda—Leonai—my second father, whose name I can't even have the decency to recall?_ How had this not bothered him? He reached into the depths of his memory and pieced together only a handful of names. His arms wrapped around his knees, and there was an insane pressure on his shoulders that made him want to whimper and laugh and cry all at the same time.

He stuffed his face in his knees and tried to forget how small Bentley had looked doing the same, how his aura reeked of fear and his body spoke of terror and how much Alcor had fucked up, as per fucking usual. He tried to forget feeling that way when he was twelve and looking up at Bill's engorged form, Mabel's hand being ripped away from his sweaty palm and knowing that he was going to die and there was nothing he could do about it.

The pressure on his shoulders lightened, and then came back in spurts. His wings just wrapped around him, right and comforting but not what he needed, more than he even deserved. All he'd earned over the course of his mistake-riddled existence was the recently broken Shack in the Mindscape and the tree that bore only bitter fruit since yesterday.

There was white noise around him, like static that spiked and dipped in volume and tone. Alcor tried to ignore it.

It rose higher and louder than ever before, and then there was pain blooming across the side of his head and spreading needle-thin fingers through the rest of his scalp. Alcor was suddenly aware of the anger and fear pushing into the guilt in the air and the danger inherent in such a thing. His head snapped up and his wings raised up behind him, edges curling menacingly.

There was a figure in front of him, smeared with something tarry and taking a step back. Its hands were held up in front of him in a pose that Alcor did not kn—

Wait. He did know it. Alcor blinked, and then he saw Philip, eyes wide and arms held in an awkward 'please don't hurt me' stance. His wings started to droop behind him.

Philip didn't say anything for a moment. Alcor looked away from the man and towards the rest of the room. He saw oil-slick ooze dripping in thin tendrils down from the ceiling, puddles of dark red sliding down the fabric of the couch, and thin, translucent gold smeared over his hands and staining the white cuffs of his Transcendence-era formalwear.

"I—" His voice caught in his throat, and he looked back up from his hands at Philip, horrified at the lack of control and feeling a dull pain when he remembered that neither Mabel nor Henry nor the triplets were there to help clean this up the way they had in his demonic youth. What was he even doing here? Who wanted to take care of a demon that just made a mess of your house and a mess of your life and a mess of your soul?

"It…It's okay. Um. It'll clean up, right?" Philip slowly put down his hands and set his feet even. The look on his face wasn't quite Henry's, and his words were wrong and his face was wrong and his soul wasn't any that Alcor had ever paid attention to before, but the sentiment was so familiar that it hurt.

Alcor turned his head to the side and dipped it down to hide it from view. "Yeah," he said, and part of him was horrified at how choked and young and vulnerable it sounded. _It's weak. It's deceiving. Why am I calling attention to this? I'm not the one having nightmares, I'm not the one hurting worst, I'm not his son, I_ ate _his son and expected him to come out fine._

At first, he thought that Philip had left. Then the couch dipped down next to him again, and Philip spoke in a soft voice. "I didn't mean twelve literally, you know."

He was thrown out of his self-hatred for a moment at the odd admission, enough that he looked at Philip out of the corner of his eye. "What?"

The man gestured to all of Alcor, and still puzzled, Alcor looked down at himself. For a moment, he saw nothing wrong. But the longer he studied his hands, the younger and smaller and softer they seemed. He raised a hand and traced the side of his cheek, which was rounder than he remembered.

"Oh. Sorry." Despite his words, part of him purred in approval _Set him off guard by looking younger, you can take more advantage of him when he least expects it._

He shoved the idea out of his mind and hated himself for even thinking about it. The silence was heavy as he waited for Philip to speak, and he began to wonder if this counted as ending the deal; Philip only wanted Alcor to hear him out, and Alcor was ready to remove himself from the environment. _All you are is poison, is radiation, making those around you sicker and sicker the longer you're there._

He wondered about his brother and sister and niblings, how they had lived long, happy lives. _Not Henry_ , he remembered. Henry had died far before his time, tainted by blue fire and dead hands swinging from branching antlers that he hadn't had before meeting Alcor.

"Why did you approach Bentley?"

Alcor raised his eyes from where he'd been staring at his knees, small and knobbly under black fabric, to look at Philip's chin. "What do you mean?"

There was a rash of stubble there that hadn't been the entire time Alcor had known Philip, and it moved as the man spoke. "We know that there have been several Mizars over the years—the original Mizar the Gleeful in the early years after the Transcendence, Mizar the Silent a few centuries later, Mizar the Ferocious somewhere inbetween. While I didn't list them all, there are maybe seven overall that we know of, and souls do not take that much time to reincarnate. So there have to be Mizars that you didn't know of or didn't approach for some reason."

"Maybe you just don't remember them," Alcor said, looking away and pulling at the fabric of his pants with his claws. It unraveled, but the moment he let the strands go, they wove together again.

"Undoubtedly," Philip said. "Nevertheless, there have to be Mizars you never connected with, for some reason or another. Why, after this period of cruelty, did you choose to try again with Bentley?"

Alcor looked up at the ceiling, took note of the spiderwebbing hairline cracks in the plaster. "He wasn't afraid of me."

"…I think that you and Bentley have very different ideas about your initial meeting, then, and that you need to talk it out."

He looked over at Philip, confused. "What do you mean?"

Philip's expression, if Alcor remembered right, did not speak well of Philip's opinion of Alcor's state of mind. " Two years ago? Bentley was a niner and had just entered the public school system?"

"But that's the second time we met." Alcor frowned and scraped his claws together. "The first was when he was nine. He was…he was dreaming, he was in my territory of the Mindscape."

"He was in the _Mindscape?_ Where demons usually reside?" Philip's face, when Alcor glanced up from his claws, was drawn. His aura didn't look very relieved at all.

"Yes," Alcor said. He opened his mouth to continue, then thought about what Philip had just said. "And it's unlikely that he would have gone anywhere else because I—"

He remembered the feeling of slipping his will into another's body, of forcing muscles to relax and heart-rate to lower and respiration to slow. He remembered Bentley's panic and fear and anger welling up and building with no outlet to take advantage of. He remembered enjoying the rush of power, the knowledge that he could make Bentley do _anything_ , and he only just avoided throwing up.

"Own his soul." Philip sounded relieved, at least. He shouldn't have been. "So he visited you in a dream?"

Alcor nodded and bit back his self-loathing and guilt.. "I was still…not very nice. And he didn't care. He was…bright. Unafraid. Accepting." _Like Mabel_.

"Mabel?"

He hadn't realized he said her name aloud. Fear gripped his chest until he told himself that Philip Farkas didn't know, he wouldn't know, that Mabel Pines was Mizar unless he actually dug into it. "Mabel," he repeated, and it had been so long since he'd heard her name. It was painful and heartening all at once.

"What were they like?"

Alcor stared down at his palms. He imagined that they were hers. "She was…she was the sun. She was the stars. She was everything." The words hurt and they healed as they came out. "She was the most important person in my life. She will always be the most important. I would do _anything_ for her."

"…she was Mizar. She was your sister."

His vision blurred yellow, and he closed his eyes. Her face was burned into the back of his eyelids from centuries of staring at her scrapbooks, at her face, of tracing her cheek on laminated paper and trying not to lash out. "Yes."

"So you talked to Bentley because he's like this 'Mabel' person." Philip pronounced her name oddly, the 'a' just a bit too flat and the 'e' almost too long.

Alcor swallowed the lump in his throat. "I—I guess. Because he was familiar, because part of me realized that I needed that."

Philip hummed. "There have been hypotheses that the Mizars we know typically come between close periods of your more demonic behavior, but there are too many contradictions and not enough support for these theories. Would you say that Mizars are your rock, your anchor?"

He had needed Mizar so much. He still needed Mizar. He needed their humanity, their goodness and challenging natures. He needed them to remind him of his own weak, crippled human nature. But all he said to Philip was, "Yes."

The man could have said anything, but what he chose to say was, "Is there anybody else?"

Alcor looked over at Philip. The holographic lenses were almost invisible. "What do you mean?"

"Well," Philip leaned over and placed his forearms on his knees, fingers folded over one another. "In the stories, there are others. The Woodsman, for example. Gliese. Wanda. Are they real? Do they have reincarnations?"

He nodded.

"Were they close to you?"

His brother, his nibbling, his friend. The others Philip didn't know, whose names had been lost to misplaced records and ill-timed fires. Soos and Grunkle Stan and Pacifica and…and Mabel's friends, Granda and Canda (whose names did not sound right), and everybody else he had somehow forgotten over the course of time. He was reminded, with a strong burst of self-hatred, how much he had neglected to remember "Of course."

"But you only look for Mizar."

Alcor clenched his jaw and looked away from Philip again. "They're not so easy to find."

Philip hesitated before speaking. "May I say something very direct?"

He dragged a hand down his face and waved the other in a 'go ahead' motion.

"You need to learn that relationships aren't easy."

His hand fell down to his lap, and he looked at nothing in particular. It took him a few moments to process the words, and once he did, he was understanding and defensive and angry all at once. "E͝x̸ç̵ú̶̴se̵ m̴͜e?"

Philip crossed his arms. " _Relationships aren't easy_. You have to put effort into them. You have to be open and honest and understand that you aren't the center of the cosmos. Moreover, you can't just hang onto Bentley; he's sixteen. He can't handle that kind of pressure."

"How do you know that?" Alcor bristled and leaned forward into Philip's space, pushing down stray thoughts of agreement in his anger. "Mizars are strong!"

Philip leaned right back in, even though Alcor could see the terror climbing up through his shoulders and into his eyes. "And my son came home with a dislocated shoulder and an infected cut on his hand. He came back from supporting you, apparently, and cannot sleep more than five minutes at a time. He has not been to school. He has not interacted with almost anybody. He sits in his room and stares at the wall and cannot stand to be in an unlit space. He's _sixteen_."

A few heartbeats later, Alcor backed off and growled, still-small hands sliding through his hair and digging into his scalp, dangerously close to breaking the skin. "Then what do I _do_?"

"Help him," Philip said, voice still laced with frustration and fear. "Help him. Give him space. Look for others."

Mizar had always been just enough, Alcor thought. He closed his eyes and hunched over his knees.

"Alcor," Philip said, a bit softer. "Bentley cannot be your everything. And you cannot be his."

Alcor grit his teeth. He inhaled, processed the statement, then exhaled. He reached out, slowly and carefully as to not alert Bentley to his presence, and took a good look at the bond between them.

Bentley was still terrified. He was sending distress signals and stay-away signals one right after the other, and Alcor knew that being around Bentley would only make the situation worse, even if he _could_ eat nightmares. He readied himself to blip out of the apartment for the last time. "Okay. I understand."

Philip inhaled to say something, and then didn't say it. Right before Alcor made to tesser, he said, "I didn't mean that you couldn't have a healthy relationship with Bentley. Just that…" he met Alcor's eyes as the latter turned to face him, "that you should reach out to others too. For Bentley, yes, but also for _yourself_."

Alcor opened his mouth. He shut it. He opened it again. "I—I'll just hurt him."

"And he'll hurt you." Philip hesitated, then slid an arm all the way across Alcor's shoulders. "But if you're honest and if you try to explain, if you give him space but show him that you're there for him, then you'll have a better relationship than you've had in the past."

It was comfortable there. Alcor felt like crying again, but he just drew his knees up and slid an arm across his eyes. "I don't deserve it," he said.

"Maybe not. That's up to Bentley to decide though, not you." Philip squeezed his shoulder, and then stood. "Now come on, my son needs to sleep sometime this week, and I'd rather it be sooner than later."

Alcor stared up at the man, who was taller now that Alcor was physically twelve, and tried to tell himself that Philip was right. He wasn't allowed to decide if he was worthy of Bentley or not. He wasn't allowed to back out now that the going was tough.

It didn't quite work. He still remembered vicious joy in possession and the sly temptation of a life's worth of energy, he remembered anger so hot it was cold when he realized that Bentley was going to mess up his plan, _his genius plan_ , and he remembered how he'd come so close to pulling Bentley's soul out of his chest just for the look on his face. He knew that wasn't human. He knew that was despicable.

But Bentley, even if he hated and was afraid of Alcor, needed him. So Dipper reached up and took Philip's outstretched hand.


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N:** Here's part two. There's a panic attack or two in here, so if you can't read that at the moment, I suggest putting this chapter off until later.

* * *

For the first time in days, Bentley's nightmare dissolved into dreamless sleep. It was enough to startle him awake, not terrified of a creeping nothing crawling up over him and devouring him in bursts of violent pain, but confused that it had cut off before it had ended. He sat up slowly, still sore from his escapade of two days ago, and looked around the room.

It was with a tinge of fear, a rush of anger, and a startling lack of surprise that he saw Alcor floating at his bedside, looking guilty and worn but also determined. The mix of emotion was odd to see on such a young face—he hadn't seen Tyrone Pines so young in years.

"What are you doing here?" Bentley asked, low and quiet. He was too tired to yell. "I didn't want to see you."

"Ah," Alcor said, locking and unlocking his fingers. "Um. You were having nightmares."

"Yes," Bentley said. "I was. Why are you here?"

"I called him and told him to eat them." Bentley hadn't realized his father was in the room, but there he was, standing in the open doorway, arms crossed. He looked less tired than Bentley felt, but Bentley felt as though he would cry if he wasn't able to get some good sleep.

"Eat…them?" Bentley repeated. His stomach turned at the notion of Alcor eating, and he clutched at his stomach. He remembered the ripping and the tearing, the questioning his own existence, the slow meander into insanity, and he felt bile and the durian pudding from earlier rise up the back of his throat. If it wouldn't have set him off more, he would have closed his eyes; instead, he stared at his blanket and saw the weave double from the intensity of his stare.

"Oh fuck. Um. Bentley? I—I just took the nightmare away. It's something I can do sometimes. You're fine, nothing's going to happen! Promise."

"Bentley? Ben, what's wrong? What…Alcor, what's going _on_?" That was his father, Bentley thought. His father was safe. His father was memories of warm tea and morning snuggles, bedtime stories and rapid typing. He gripped the bedsheets harder, felt the weave between his fingers, and closed his eyes. He concentrated on how soft they felt, how they brushed against his skin and stimulated the nerve endings there. The breath returned to his lungs, and he made sure to savor it with every inhale. There had been no breath in Alcor's stomach.

"Ah, he should be fine now. I think. If he has another nightmare, I guess call me again but I'm taking them. I'm taking them. Not—not the other thing."

"No, you're not leaving right now. Not until you explain."

Bentley realized then that there was a warm weight around his shoulders, that he was being held by something that smelled like too much caffeinated tea and faux-wool. That was okay. He opened his eyes and released the blanket, wincing as he did so.

Looking down at his right hand, he stared at the red seeping out from under the bandage without realizing that it was a symptom of the hurt. Then he blinked, recognized the red as blood and said, "Oh. My hand."

His father's hands were then cradling his injured one, careful of his injured shoulder. The clinic hadn't done much other than set it in a wrap of healing gel and bandage his hand with some antibacterial, high-absorption gauze; such was life when you were covered with only the lowest grade of health insurance available.

"Alcor, answer me. What happened?"

Honestly, he hadn't even realized that Alcor was still in the room. He looked over his dad's shoulder at the end of the bed. The demon didn't seem too threatening now; he was pale and there were too-human bags under his eyes. His cheeks were too soft, his face was too young, and he was turning his top hat around in his hands. He looked like he should be wearing something brighter than black; it was too somber.

"…I think it's up to Bentley to tell you that story," Alcor murmured.

"Does he look like he's anywhere near ready for that?" His father said, his throat bobbing the way it did when he was horrifically angry. Bentley hadn't seen him like that since he was six and had let the Mailman into the apartment.

Alcor's shoulders hunched, and his wings pulled up over them. He looked absolutely tiny. "I…"

His father looked over his own shoulder. Bentley couldn't read his expression before the man sighed and let go of his son's hands. "Okay. I get it. I'm going to want to hear it soon, though."

Instead of speaking, Alcor nodded, still staring down at the top hat in his hands. Bentley wasn't close to forgiving him, wasn't even sure if he ever would, but something in him prodded him to speak.

"Alcor, I…" Bentley stopped, tried to find the words. Alcor had paused mid-motion, and was very carefully not looking up. Taking a deep breath, Bentley spoke again. "I can't forgive you. I can't. But if…If I need help, like with nightmares, I guess it's okay. For you to come back."

Alcor, still staring down at his lap, nodded. "Just. Call me, okay?"

His father made a disgruntled noise, but said nothing.

Bentley took a deep breath, and let it out. He wanted to try to sleep again, though he still felt uneasy when Alcor was still in the room. "Sorry, but can you…"

Without a word, Alcor disappeared from sight with a shifting in the air. Sighing, Bentley drooped forward and pressed his forehead against his father's shoulder. His father slid his hand up and down Bentley's back, the motion soothing enough that Bentley soon felt himself going limp.

He was only dimly aware that, minutes later, his father had pulled him into his arms and had stood. Then he felt his bed beneath his back and the covers being drawn over him. There was a final hesitation, then a press of his father's lips smack in the middle of Bentley's forehead. Bentley let out an indistinct noise, then drifted off to uneasy sleep.

* * *

The next time he had a nightmare, he woke with a desperate scream curdling in the back of his throat and his hands tied in his sheets. He thought about calling Alcor, of telling him to eat the next Nightmare. Then he thought of the Alcor in his dream, the one with cold eyes and ordering submission and holding Bentley still with only a thought, and he tried to fall asleep.

It didn't work so well, and Bentley drifted through school the next day as though he were a wraith. Torako made good on her promise several days ago to call his father and make him go home.

Although he hadn't called Alcor, and although he hadn't seen hide nor hair of the demon, there was a soft-knit wool sweater on his bed when he entered it, bags under his eyes and stumbling when he walked.

He thought about not wearing it. He thought about throwing it against the wall, of screaming in exhausted frustration and raging at the forces in the universe for Mizar's cursed soul choosing his body. But in the end he picked it up, held the soft material under his hands and remembered Alcor in a child's body, mostly silent and visibly bleeding guilt and remorse into the air around him.

When he put on the sweater and climbed into bed, the nightmares still came. But they were fuzzy, soft, and indistinct, and Bentley slept better than he had in a long, long time.

* * *

The next bad nightmare came in the middle of a schoolday that Bentley had taken off, tired and morose and a week and a half after he'd decided to ignore Torako's advice and find the cult. It was on a day that his dad was out of the apartment, at some sort of intellectualist's meeting; he almost hadn't gone, but Bentley told him that everything would be fine, that nothing would happen, that if he had a nightmare he would call Alcor, and if it was anything else he would call Torako's parents.

When he woke up, his room was pitch black.

Fear bubbled up in the back of his throat, and he stared up at the ceiling. There should have been stars there, should have been galaxies, slowly moving over the cracked plaster in tandem with the spin of the earth. But there was nothing, and Bentley scrambled to sit. He crawled off the bed and fumbled to find his nightlight by touch alone. When he found the switch and flipped it, there was no light _there was no light_. It was hard to breathe, and he kept filling his chest deeper and deeper but it didn't expand far enough. He wasn't in Alcor's stomach, he told himself. He could feel. He could hear his own ragged gasps in the awful, eerie silence. He tried to concentrate on it, but his eyes were wide open and he couldn't _see_.

Stumbling over to the door, he hit the control panel for the opening mechanism. It did not respond. He hit the frame, the solid panels of the door itself, but the door did not open. The air became thinner and thinner until he was barely able to breathe through his panicked coughing.

"Dad!" He screamed, once he had enough air. "Dad! Dad!"

It took him a few moments to realize that his father wasn't there, that he couldn't be there. He gripped the sleeves of his sweater and wondered when he'd fallen to his knees. His mouth was wide open, and the air rushed in and out of it, sliding up and down his gums and brushing against his tongue.

He couldn't see he couldn't breathe he couldn't hear anything above the pounding in his ears and he needed help he needed help _he needed help_ and despite himself, the name that choked out of him was, "Alcor!"

The fabric of the world tore apart and there was a rustle of fabric and the snapping of wings and Alcor snarled into the silence. Bentley realized after a few rapid heartbeats that Alcor was crouched over him.

"Alcor," Bentley croaked. "Alcor. Can't see. Alcor."

A pause, and then blue light filled the room, cradled in Alcor's hands. The flames moved oddly, cast Alcor's still-too-young face into stark shadows and made him loom more than someone his current stature should be able to. Bentley could see, but fear gurgled in his gut.

"Is this better?" Alcor asked, then paused and searched Bentley's face. He also searched the air around Bentley's face and tilted his head as though listening to something, a frown slowly etching itself into his face. He looked down at Bentley again. "It…isn't better? What's wrong?"

Bentley was laying down at that point, his good shoulder pinned uncomfortably between his body and the floor. Staring up at the flames shimmering through the cracks between Alcor's fingers, he felt the knot in his stomach tighten even as some of the fear went away with the light. Breathing became much easier "It's…"

Alcor crouched down next to Bentley. He kept the fire close, but the proximity of the flames made the hair on the back of Bentley's neck stand up. "Does it need to be closer? Are you…You're still scared, just a different scared. Is that right?"

Bentley swallowed against the lump in his throat and nodded.

"Why?" Alcor's face, if it were actually a child's, would have broken Bentley's heart. But it wasn't, so Bentley rolled over and pushed himself to a sitting position and leaned back against the foot of his bed.

"I don't like the fire," Bentley mumbled, staring at the tops of his knees. He was starting to feel sick, like his skin wanted to crawl off his arms and his stomach wanted to follow suit.

"Okay," Alcor said, and the fire sputtered out.

For all of ten seconds, Bentley was more or less calm. Then he opened his mouth and asked, "Can you find my paso-let?"

There was rustling from somewhere by his desk, and Alcor said, "Yeah. It's dead, though."

 _What?_ Bentley charged it every night without fail. Abruptly, he remembered that he'd just tossed it on the desk after school yesterday and had tried to sleep instead of plugging it in. He moaned and dragged a hand through his hair, pulling at the strands to distract himself from the fear building up again. "My—My MSS. Where's that?"

A short, too-long silence later, Alcor spoke up again. "I don't know, it's not here."

Bentley bit down on the panic clawing at the back of his throat. He shut his eyes, squeezed them shut, but the darkness was no different than what it had been when they were open. Sunbursts of phantom, faded light rolled and twisted in the corners of his eyes, vanishing whenever he tried to focus on them. He opened his eyes again and there they were, taunting him, baiting his mind with implications that if they weren't real, what was? Was that really skin under his fingers, was that really the sound of his breath, was the pain actually there?

He dug his fingernails into the fabric of his pants and pressed the edges into his shins. It was only just there, just recognizable, and he latched onto it. It wasn't enough, though, and anxiety crushed his lungs between its palms. Bentley coughed, he pushed his head against his knees, and curled his fingers further past the fabric of his pants and into his skin.

Then there were hands pushing under his, between his legs and his nails, and he lifted his head, startled. There was nothing in the gloom in front of him, but a soft shushing noise came from there and— _Alcor?_

"Hey. Hey. Calm down, it's going to be fine."

"How—" The breath stopped halfway from his lungs, his jaw suddenly couldn't close, and he let out a strangled howl. His cheeks were wet. His eyes ached. His head fell again, and the next inhale he took was released in short, gasping bursts.

Alcor's hands were gripped around his own now. He could just feel the points of the claws against the bones on the backs of his hands, and the fear tightened around his sides. "It's—I don't know. I could always, I guess, flood your system with endorphins? It won't work long-term but it'll get you through—"

The next exhale came out as a gurgle, and he pushed against the back of the bed, wrenching his hands out of Alcor's grip. "No," he heaved out at last, jaw finally unlocked. And once it came out, it didn't stop. "No no no no no no no."

Alcor shifted, hopefully away from him. "Shit," he said. It was an odd word, arcane and sibilant and nothing Bentley had heard before. "That was—that was not very—you're such a fucking _idiot_ , Dipper."

The silence was heavy, punctuated with Bentley doing his best to get his breathing under control and failing miserably. Alcor sighed, a frustrated, self-loathing thing that made Bentley feel vindictive and hopeful and guilty all at once.  
"Sorry," Alcor said finally. "Shit. I. Don't humans have adjustable eyesight or something? I keep forgetting."

Bentley laughed without knowing why. It burbled out of him, wet and messy. "Yeah," he said, but his heart was ringing in his ears and his fists were clenched hard enough that something wet was oozing out around his fingers.

"You're bleeding."

He would have tipped his head in a non-committal answer if he hadn't been shaking so much. Instead of speaking, he dragged in abbreviated bursts of air, letting them out the same, stomach-achingly rough way.

"This has to stop," Alcor said, voice high-pitched. "This has to stop. How do I make it stop, how do I make it better?"

Bentley wanted to unlock his fists, but they were frozen there, muscles turned to stone and blood dripping down his fingers and dropping off the knuckles. He felt strung out, wound too tight and unable to let go, and he was so sick of feeling this way and he just wanted it to stop.

"…I see," Alcor murmured, still with a note of hysteria in his voice. "I see. I just…"

There was a great spark, and then nothing. Moments passed by without anything happening, and Bentley tried to blink the ghostly afterimage of false hope out of his eyes.

Then the lights flickered on, his Holosky returned an image of the cosmos to his ceiling, and it was already so much easier to breathe. Bentley could move at last, and he uncurled his hands. The fingertips were sticky, the sides almost welded shut by blood in places. He looked up at Alcor.

The demon was pale—almost transparent, Bentley realized. Alcor was floating, but it seemed like it was taking all of his power to stay in the air. His eyes found Bentley's, and his mouth twitched up in an exhausted smile.

"It worked," he said, voice crackling and breaking like auditory holo static. "Sorry it took so long."

Bentley stared as Alcor swayed back and forth, eyelids falling and jerking open every few seconds. Eventually, he just nodded and looked down at his hands.

There were red splotches all over the vibrant blue sweater sleeves, and Bentley balked. "No," he said, and his voice really wasn't much better than Alcor's. "It's stained."

"'S fine," Alcor said, and he was so close to the ground he could have just fallen through it. In fact, one of his coattails was drooping through the floor. "Mabel'd be okay with that."

"Mabel?" The name was foreign on his tongue, awkward and bulky. His chest was loosening with every breath, and he was starting to feel the weight of fatigue on his shoulders again.

"Yeah, she was…" Alcor paused, then frowned. "She was…she was the best."

Bentley watched as the demon settled at floating a couple centimeters off the floor. Yellow started to leak from his eyes and—he hadn't really seen Alcor cry before. His legs unfolded.

Then Alcor drew an arm over his face, elbow pointing somewhere towards _Ursa Major_ , and he croaked, "The best."

As he watched Alcor grit his teeth and then relax, yellow staining his suit sleeves, Bentley realized that in the two years he'd known the demon, he had never seen the Alcor act so human.


	3. Chapter 3

**A/N:** Bentley and Alcor visit people in another country.

* * *

He woke from the fuzzy nightmare, half-aware of the way it had cut out halfway through, sticking to his subconscious before being sucked away. Usually, he fell back asleep after the sensation, but this time he peered up at Alcor with sleep-narrowed eyes.

Alcor's face, shadowed and lit blue by Bentley's small collection of glowing figurines clustered on a small table by his bed, was slack in surprise. Bentley couldn't help but notice the bags under the other's eyes, despite the fact that his dad had started giving Alcor small snacks in exchange for eating Bentley's nightmares (the thought still made him cringe, still made him think of nothing and the question of existence and Philosophy would never, ever be a good subject for him).

"That taste was…different," Alcor said. He floated upright so that he wasn't hanging over Bentley's body in such a creepy way. Bentley sat up, rubbed his eyes, and then looked over at the clock: 4:58. Well, at least it was Saturday.  
Bentley grunted. Even though Alcor had been helpful to the point of hurting himself, Bentley still wasn't sure. He was around less, and he was more subdued than he had been in the past, but that didn't mean that Bentley could unsee the demon behind Alcor.

"…What was it about?" Alcor asked. He'd never asked before; Bentley thought that somehow he'd just known. He began to wonder if maybe Alcor had been afraid to ask.

No. That couldn't be it. Alcor had to have known.

"You know," Bentley muttered, leaning against the wall and taking in Alcor's dimly lit form. Alcor looked older, finally, after days of being twelve, but his wings were still tight against his back and the blue light washed him out. Bentley didn't even want to know how awful he looked; yesterday, Torako had been on the verge of dragging him to her place and wringing answers out of him.

"I don't," Alcor said, low and quiet.

Bentley tipped his head back against the wall and stared up at the starscape above him. He chewed the words around in his mouth and tried to put them into the best order. "You always know what I'm dreaming."

"Not always. Just the feel. It's like, one tastes—" Alcor paused, and his voice lowered another notch. "I'm sorry. They just usually feel the same. This felt different."

Without taking his eyes off the constellation _Volans_ , Bentley said, "Really?"

"Really."

The flying fish really didn't look like one; he only remembered where it was because Torako'd made a huge fuss about it when her buddy Xiao Ming had pointed it out. He stared at the six stars and couldn't even muster the energy to frown.

"How are they doing?" He finally asked.

Alcor was quiet for just a heartbeat. "Who?"

"The little girl and her mom. The ones whose lives you own." Bentley really didn't mean for that particular tone to come out, but he supposed that letting Alcor know just what he thought of that notion wasn't a bad idea.

"Oh." Alcor sounded younger, and Bentley lowered his eyes from the ceiling to look at the demon. The difference was subtle, but his cheeks were just a bit rounder than they had been before. "They're—they're doing well."

Bentley returned his attention to the constellations. "Really?"

This time, Alcor didn't respond immediately. The mattress shifted underneath him, and Bentley tipped his head lower to take in the demon again. He was tangible, was kneeling on Bentley's scattered bedsheets, hands fisted above his knees.

"You don't believe me, do you?"

Tilting his head in neither agreement nor disagreement, Bentley looked down at his own hands. He shifted the fingers up and down ever so slightly.

"…Of course you don't trust me," Alcor said, a hint of a laugh in his voice. "I wouldn't trust me."

Bentley let out a quiet snort. "Yeah."

He kept staring at his fingers, shifting them, half-watching out for the symptoms of possession that he only half-knew weren't going to come. The silence was thick, almost suffocating. Bentley wondered why he'd even made the decision to wake up. Then he remembered the nightmare's little-girl screams and the frantic pleading to take her, take her and rip her apart but not her child, not her child.

His hands were shaking. He couldn't stop them from shaking, couldn't stop the ache in his shoulder from throbbing, couldn't ignore the scar forming on his right palm. Torako had asked about the scar when she'd seen it yesterday, but he couldn't even think of a good lie to tell her. They'd spent the rest of lunch in uneasy silence.

"Would you like to see them? Would that help?"

He raised his head. Alcor was leaning forward, and his wings were pulled out just a bit. "I'd need more than a vidclip, so probably not," he said.

"That's not what I meant," Alcor said. The corners of his mouth, if Bentley's eyes didn't deceive him, were tugged up slightly. "Did you want to see them in person? It should be—oh, just after seven over there."

"I don't have enough money for that." Bentley said.

Alcor shook his head. "No money needed. I can take you there. Not through my—well, not the way you traveled last time, but by blipping."

"Blipping?" Bentley pushed himself up against the wall.

He did that weird shrugging thing with his shoulders and looked away. "That's what Mabel called it," he said.

Bentley didn't ask who Mabel was. He still wasn't sure if he'd get a clear answer if he asked, though he certainly had his suspicions. "I don't…"

"If you don't want to, that's fine," Alcor said. "I understand. But if you think it would help to see them—to talk to them—I can take you there."

He should have said no. He should have. But the little girl's crying and the woman's begging tumbled around the back of his skull, and shouldn't having their voices saying different things help?

Before he could talk himself out of it, Bentley flipped his right hand over, scar up. "Okay," he said, and damn it if it didn't come out softer and more frightened than it had sounded in his head.

"Thank you," Alcor said, a little older and a little more relieved, and there was a light pull not unlike that of the TranspoPods before Bentley found himself suddenly not in his bedroom anymore.

They were on the front step of a small house in a quiet, crowded suburb. Bentley had never seen one before, growing up in an oasis of tall apartment buildings, so he turned to face the street. It was cold, and there was a light mist lingering above the pavements; across the street and to the left, a lone hoverboard sat out on the portway, gathering dew.

He stood there, arms wrapped around himself and shoulder beginning to ache something fierce, Alcor beside him. Something like this was kind of nice, he thought, even if it was cold. He'd love to have a garden-yard.

Behind him, the door creaked open. An older person's voice hissed, "What are you doing here?"

"Just coming by to say hi! I brought a visitor," Alcor said, oddly cheerful. "Man, your soul in that body kills me every time."

"And _you're_ not getting it," the person said. Their voice was shorter on the vowels and enunciated the consonants more than Bentley was used to. "Get in here, I don't want the neighbors to see!"

Alcor tapped him on his good shoulder, and Bentley turned around. When the person saw him, she covered her mouth. Her eyes were dark and wide, and her hair silver-gray against pale skin.

"For Heaven's sake, get that child in here! It's September, there's no need for them to get a cold!"

"He, please," Bentley said, allowing himself this once to be guided through the door by Alcor, who seemed far more familiar with the place anyhow.

"Of course. Now what are you doing darkening my doorstep with some poor kid in your wake? He doesn't need a home, does he? Isn't that something you mentioned that you did?" The elderly lady shut the door and clapped her hands twice.

The lights turned on, and Bentley peered around the open room. A small kitchen was located in the back corner, and there were comfortable seats arranged invitingly. They looked soft, and Bentley found himself overcome with the urge to sink into them. He took a step in that direction but was stopped by Alcor's hand on his shoulder.

"It's something I do, Sadie. And no, he's here to talk to your daughter and granddaughter." Alcor slid up behind Bentley. The moment Bentley started to feel uneasy, however, Alcor pulled back, his hand sliding off Bentley's shoulder.

"Whatever for?" Sadie asked. "Now dear, sit down, you look exhausted. Have you eaten breakfast?"

Bentley shook his head. "No, it's five," he mumbled.

This seemed to throw her off her stride. She didn't say anything as she directed him to the nearest seat, which really was as soft as it looked. Bentley curled up and tucked his hands under his legs.

"I'll get Carmen then," she said, and left. Bentley sat in the armchair and tried to keep his eyes at least somewhat open.

"They'll be down in a moment," Alcor said, and Bentley tilted his head up to take in the demon leaning against the arm of the chair. "If you fall asleep, I'll just pop back to let your dad know that you're here and safe."

"M'kay," Bentley said. He let his head drop down and surveyed the room again, almost forgetting what he'd seen as soon as his eyes left it. He observed thin white curtains and festive, European-centric fall ornamentation. Time crawled by slowly, like staring at the tide rise.

"Wait," he said, feeling a bit more alert. "Dad doesn't know where I am."

"Probably not," Alcor said, and when Bentley twisted around to look at him more fully, his wings were rubbing against each other, and he was pulling at the skin on his hands. "No, I'd say he doesn't."

Bentley pulled his hands out from under his thighs and dragged them down his face. "Why did I let you talk me into this," he moaned. "He's going to freak when he can't find me."

Alcor spoke after a moment. "…oh. Yeah."

There were times when Bentley could not forget Alcor's demonic nature. And then there were times like this that he could not believe that this supernatural creature was actually revered and feared. He rubbed at his eyes with the heels of his palms and bent over. "Oh my stars," he said.

Behind them, there was a low murmur of voices, so Bentley sat back up and twisted around in his chair again. There was Sadie and the woman from the warehouse, her startling red hair cropped short around her face. The woman had hefted her daughter up on her hip, the girl's eyes half-lidded and a somewhat grumpy cast to her expression.

There was no recognition in her eyes when she spoke. "Mum told me that you both wanted to see us?"

Bentley went to rise out of the seat, but Alcor stilled him by placing a hand on his shoulder. "Yes. Carmen, Nadeshka, meet Bentley. He's been wanting to meet you."

She side-eyed him again, and Nadeshka pressed her face into her mother's shoulder. "I…don't see why. There's no connection between us."

"That's rather fo—" Alcor stopped, took in a deep breath, and then spoke again. The danger was absent from his voice then, but Bentley could still feel his shoulders drawing in. "My apologies. Bentley has a rather invested interest in you, and I acted quickly."

Bentley muttered, "And without thinking it through. Let me up, please."

Alcor huffed, but the hand on his shoulder didn't tighten the way he thought it would have. Instead, it slid off his shoulder, and Bentley stood from the chair. Moving around it, he stopped shortly before Carmen and her daughter and bowed slightly.

When he straightened, her eyes were considering. Swallowing, he said, "Hi. I'm…well, I was the guy in the warehouse. The one with the mask."

"Oh!" The suspicion and unease melted off her face, and she turned to Sadie. "Hey, Mum, could we get some breakfast for everybody?"

As Nadeshka perked up and started telling everybody that she wanted to help, Sadie frowned. It was, Bentley realized a moment later, directed at Alcor. "For _everybody_?"

"Yes, Mum," Carmen said, handing Nadeshka over to her grandmother. " _Everybody_."

Alcor, much to Bentley's surprise, held up a hand. "I—I'm good. If I could get a drink, that would be nice, but I don't need food."

The elderly lady sniffed and turned around, Nadeshka starting to shriek in her ear. "All right then, come pick one out. And feet on the ground!"

"I don't _need_ to walk," Alcor complained, but Bentley noticed the heavy tread as he passed behind Bentley. For a few moments, he watched them go, two humans and a demon, to the open-view kitchen in the back of the room. Then he turned back to Carmen, and a thought struck him.

"How can you stand to see him eat?" He asked.

She gave him a tight smile. "With help," she said. "Let's sit down. You wanted to talk?"

"N-Not really," he said rubbing at the back of his neck. "Just—I needed to make sure that you guys were actually okay."

Carmen did not answer him for a long while. He averted his eyes after only moments of awkward silence, glancing over at the kitchen where Nadeshka was pulling herself up Alcor's leg. He bent down and pulled her up, settling her on his shoulders as she giggled.

"You need to talk," she said at last. "You can't talk with anybody and you need to, don't you?"

Bentley looked back at her. She was only a little taller than he was, he noticed, close enough that he felt as though they were the same height if he didn't think about it. "I…"

She stepped up to him and put her hand on his back. "Come on. Let's go sit at the table and talk this out; heavens know you can't really do that back home."

He let himself be led.

* * *

Hours later, after a filling, if somewhat heavy breakfast and at least two breakdowns, Bentley was sitting on the couch near the entrance of the house, curtains drawn and hazy daylight filtering in through them. Alcor had stepped out ages ago, telling Bentley just to call him when he needed to be picked up. He'd plopped a sleepy Nadeshka on Bentley's lap and blipped out of there, and Sadie had left to go get groceries.

"Maybe he'll never make it up to you," Carmen said. "Fuck knows Daina will never, ever be able to make up to me, and I never want to see her again. People hurt you, Bentley. But you know what makes Alcor so much better than Daina?"

Nadeshka patted at his wet cheeks, then pressed up against his side and rested her head just under his chin. Bentley was very, very glad that they were sitting down, because being entrusted with a child was nerve-wracking. "No," he muttered.

"He cares." Carmen fingered her short hair. "I told you that Nadeshka doesn't really remember, right?"

He hummed an affirmative, wrapping his arm around Nadeshka and hoping he was doing it right. In an odd way, he knew that Alcor did care, but he wondered if he always did.

"That kind of magic is intensive," she said, leaning forward in the seat across from the couch. "I should know; I studied it extensively. It requires patience and delicacy. He didn't rip the memories out. He didn't suppress them or lock them away. He just…it's like he placed a film over them. And all he took was my hair."

"That seems unfair," Bentley said. He looked down at Nadeshka's head. "And should we…"

"It was and she knows." Carmen reached out and smoothed down Nadeshka's hair. "She knows that it happened, she knows that something changed so that she's not as affected by it anymore, and she knows that Alcor was the one who did it."

"Oh," Bentley said. He wondered why Alcor hadn't offered to do the same for him, and thought he would have given anything to be removed from the situation.

"Here's the thing, Bentley," Carmen said, and her hand moved from Nadeshka's head to his arm. He looked into her eyes. "Even with that unfair deal, he didn't look nearly as awful as he does today. He cares about you, Bentley. He cares about you far more than he cares about himself."

"That doesn't make it right," Bentley said, looking away.

"No," Carmen said, and she had moved to her knees in front of Bentley. "It doesn't. He was wrong to do that."

She paused. Then, for the first time since they'd started speaking, she said, "But while you were good to try, and I can't fault you for it, you were wrong too."

He frowned, anger rushing up through his chest. "How was I wrong? I was trying to save you!"

"Hey." She tapped him on the knee. "Stop that. I'm saying that you were trying to do a good thing, but did it ever occur to you to ask for help? You knew Alcor beforehand, you said so yourself; why didn't you go to him? Daina had been trying for a while to summon him, he would have known."

"Because—" The reason died before it hit his tongue, and he scowled. He hadn't trusted Alcor because he'd been acting shifty.

Carmen exhaled through her nose. "Because you didn't trust him. Daina didn't trust me either, and look where we ended up. Look where you two have ended up."

He was quiet. She was making sense in all the wrong ways and he didn't want her to make sense, but she did.

"Yes, Alcor should have talked to you. He should still talk to you. But a relationship of any kind is an open conversation, and you have not been having that."

"You lecture him about this?" Bentley muttered. He'd been wronged. He'd been taken control of, he had been eaten and then regurgitated whole. He couldn't stand the dark anymore without breaking down. Not Alcor.

"Obliquely," Carmen said, moving back into the chair. "If you really want me to, I can mention it to him again when you go home."

Only slightly mollified, Bentley shifted his arm under Nadeshka. It was starting to tingle, and his shoulder was beginning to ache again. As if sensing his continued anger, Carmen sighed.

"Well, you'll see it when you see it," she said. "I hope it's sooner rather than later."

He frowned. "I want to go home now," he mumbled. "My dad's probably wondering where I am."

Carmen inhaled, then stood. "That's fine," she said. "Just—if you ever need to talk to anybody, have Alcor bring you over. I don't have a personal phone just yet, but I can pass the contact info along as soon as I can."

Carefully, Bentley shifted Nadeshka, who had fallen asleep by then, onto the couch cushions. He picked at a scab on his arm, blood beading up through the opening, and then pressed it to the circle he'd found on the bottom front hem of the sweater.

Alcor showed up immediately, all false, dim cheer and black baggy eyes. "Oh, hey, you're ready?"

"Make sure you talk with him soon," Carmen said. "Tell him everything. Be open."

The demon blinked, eyebrows raising. "That was abrupt. What brought that on?"

Carmen looked straight at Bentley and said, "I told Bentley I'd tell you."

"Right…" Alcor turned his head and extended his left hand out to Bentley. Nadeshka grumbled in her sleep, but didn't wake. "Okay, let's go."

The instant before Bentley took his hand, Carmen put hers on his shoulder. "Remember what I said."

With a noncommittal grunt, Bentley placed his fingers in Alcor's and tried to ignore the fact that her words were already nagging at him. He looked up at Alcor's tired face and thought, _I did that_.

No you didn't, Bentley told himself. Alcor did that to himself. It's Alcor's fault we're in this mess anyhow. It's Alcor's fault. Not Bentley's.

Alcor blipped them home.


	4. Chapter 4

**A/N:** In which things come full circle.

* * *

"Um, Bentley?" Alcor asked.

Bentley hummed and moved further down the document, taking the occasional note on the side. His grades had been slipping, and maybe if he got them up the Counselor's Office would finally stop hounding him about his 'alarming increase in absences' and 'sudden drop in classroom engagement.'  
"Do you—you've read that thing five times, do you think we could talk?"

Instead of leaving like he usually did after waking Bentley up from whatever nightmare he'd been experiencing, Alcor had hung around, speaking and cutting himself off, fretting and pulling at his hands. Bentley turned around in his seat.

"I need to get my grades up," Bentley said.

Alcor didn't look persuaded. In fact, his face grew tenser, and Bentley tried to ignore how rumpled Alcor's clothes were. "We really need to talk though. And hey, tell you what, you talk to me and I'll help you with your grades! It'll be a deal!"

 _A deal_. Of course. Bentley scowled and turned away. "No thanks."

Behind him, Alcor let out a strangled noise of frustration. The door slid open moments later, then slid shut, and Bentley breathed out through his nose. The words swam together on the screen, and instead of focusing on them he found himself remembering _you were wrong too_.

He pressed his lips together and underlined one of his notes. 'Conjugation depends on plur-' Too late, he realized it was unfinished. With a muffled growl, Bentley scribbled out the sentence entirely and put his forehead down on his desk.

Inhaling through his nose, Bentley stared at the fake woodgrain. He traced the familiar, if fading, rings and stripes with his eyes, all the while knowing that if he were to dig below the lacquer, there would be nothing but off-white filler material, cheap and sturdy and fake.

 _You were wrong too_.

In a burst of temper, Bentley smacked the top of the desk. He couldn't have been. He wasn't. He'd gone in there to save two people, even if he had failed in the end. He had to be right. _He had to be_.

Gritting his teeth, he straightened and pulled his MSS towards him, starting once again from the top of the paragraph describing conjugation conventions and exceptions. Focusing took more effort than it should, and his stylus shook in his left hand.

"Verbal conjugation depends on three factors: the temporal nature of the action, plurality of the noun which is doing the acting, and if an adverb is modifying it." Bentley read, tapping the stylus on the desk. The door hissed open. He kept reading. "While most weak verbs move from _–e_ in the present to _–io_ in the past and _–ien_ in the future, modal verbs do not."

"Bentley," his father said. "Stop."

He hunched over and raised his voice. "While modal verbs end in the weak verb _–e_ in the present tense, they change to – _ont_ in the past tense and – _ente_ in the future. Please look at the chart of modal verbs and their conjugations in the chart below and remember, all that is currently shown is—"

Bentley's father put his hands on Bentley's shoulders. "Bentley. You're acting very, very childish."

The words he was reading had no meaning. His mouth opened and translated them into audio, spilling past his lips in a rush of white noise. The sound was dull against his ears, like speech underwater, the sharp steady drumming of his stylus on the edge of the desk puncturing the surface.

Suddenly his hover chair was pulled back and turned around and his MSS fell out of his lax fingers and clattered on the desk. The sudden silence was overwhelming.

"Bentley," his father whispered. "Bentley. Stop doing this."

"What?" He asked. "What, do you mean stop ignoring the demon who literally _ate_ me?"

His father's eyes widened. " _What_?"

"He ate me," Bentley hissed, nausea bubbling in his gut. "He ate me, hurt me, he _controlled_ me."

Part of him was savagely pleased with the horror on his father's face. Part of him felt a terrible shame at the way his dad's eyes grew more tired and his mouth drew down deeper. But the smallest, deepest part of him felt a relief, like he'd just set down a weight that he hadn't noticed he was carrying.

But the moment passed, and his dad's eyes somehow straightened, somehow sharpened. "You're here now," he said.

He couldn't believe his ears. "What?"

Moving down to his knees, his dad said, "You're here now. You're not eaten. You're not controlled. You're hurt, both physically and emotionally, but you're alive."

"I can't believe it," Bentley said, low and breathy. "I can't fucking believe it. You're taking his side too?"

His father opened his mouth, then closed it again. His hair was graying, Bentley realized, and he didn't stop the scathing internal commentary on early senility setting in. Guilt mixed with the anger in his stomach.

"…why do you think there are sides?" He asked at last, eyes flitting between Bentley's.

"Because there are!" Bentley said, fisting his hands on his knees.

Bentley's father breathed in, then out through his nose. He was quiet for a good long while, but his hands were wrapped around the edges of Bentley's chair so that he couldn't turn back to his desk.

"Just let me work," Bentley muttered, looking away at the floor where his bed would be. He'd put it up for the first time that day, thinking that maybe a small modicum of productivity would help. It really hadn't; it made the room emptier and lonelier.

"I don't know everything that happened," his father said. Bentley avoided his gaze and traced the lines in the linoleum floor with his eyes. "And while this in no way excuses Alcor's eating you, from what I've gathered through conversation with Torako is that you did run off into danger without realizing you were swimming into deep water."

"Yeah, okay, that was dumb!" Bentley snapped. He crossed his arms. "And sure maybe I should have prepared better or whatever, but should I have let Carmen and her kid just die? I thought they were going to die! What the hell else am I supposed to do, just watch as people get screwed over and do nothing? And why's Torako off tattling to you anyways?"

"Because she's concerned, Bentley." His father pulled the chair forward, voice thick. Bentley froze. "Because we're all scared and concerned for you because you are sliding downhill and I don't know how to help you if you don't reach out."

Bentley stared at his father, his temper dulling. There were tears building up in his eyes, his hologlasses doing nothing to hide them. He said nothing.

He couldn't remember the last time he'd seen his father cry.

His father let go of one of the sides of the chair to rub at his eyes. Bentley could have turned the chair around, could have locked it in place so that it wouldn't move, but he just stared at the wet patches on his father's cheeks, the way his father's hands shook, the way he took in a deep, rattling breath to try to compose himself. Did he—did he do this?

The voice telling him that it was all Alcor's fault, it had always been and would always be Alcor's fault, was faltering and growing dim. It fell silent a moment later.

"Sorry," His father said. "I just—Bentley, I was so scared. I'm still so scared, because you're so deep in your anger and hurt that you're blinding yourself and hurting yourself. I don't want you to go down that road." He rubbed the heel of his palm into on one of his eyes, and then let go of the chair.

Bentley didn't turn to face his desk. Instead, he slid off the chair and onto his knees, not touching his father but wanting to. He had done this. This was his fault. And if this was his fault, then what else was?

His throat started to close up. "But I…" He stopped. The words were there on the edge of his throat, but he didn't want to say them. "But if I was wrong, then…"

He grit his teeth. _You were wrong_ , Carmen whispered in his mind. Alcor's exhaustion, his uncharacteristic tendencies; _Remember this_ , she said. Had said. _You were wrong_.

"If I was wrong, then…then it was worth nothing," he said finally. The words did not hang in the air; they fell, and Bentley imagined he could hear them clattering on the ground. Heavy. Solid. Real. "If I was wrong," he swallowed the lump in his throat, "then it was all my fault and I'm why Carmen and Nadeshka's lives aren't theirs and I'm why everything was screwed up and I'm why Daina Sainz is winning her election by leaps and bounds and I'm the fuck up, I'm the worst and I'm stupid and—"

Bentley's father pulled him into his chest, pushed Bentley's face to his shoulder. He felt his father bend his head and press his forehead against Bentley's scalp. Bentley's eyes stung and his nose stuffed and he suddenly couldn't stop crying.

"Shh, no, Bentley, no," his father murmured. He started rocking from side to side. "It's not your fault that the situation happened. It's not even Alcor's. It's whoever was cruel enough to think up such a thing."

"But I—" He said. His breath was shuddering in his chest, his lungs weren't expanding far enough before grief and guilt caught them and collapsed them again. He clutched the back of his father's sweatshirt and pressed his face into the fabric.

"It's not your fault. The situation was screwed up to begin with."

"But I screwed it up even more," Bentley howled into his father's shoulder.

For a long while, his father was quiet, rocking back and forth. He shifted so that he was sitting down and shifted Bentley into his lap, and then resumed swaying from side to side. His cheek pressed into the crown of Bentley's head.

At last, he spoke. "You both screwed up. You didn't trust each other. You didn't talk to each other. You didn't _listen_. You and Alcor probably overreacted, made bad decisions."

He pressed himself closer, but didn't say a word. His breaths were hitching less often, and when he went to move his fingers they hurt from being so tensed up.

"Alcor should not have…eaten…you to save you if there was another way," his father murmured. "I'm sorry you both had to go through that."

"Both?" He asked, pulling back so that his face wasn't pressed so far into damp sweatshirt.

"I know you've seen him. He's hurting himself just as much as you were, just in…just in a different way." Bentley's father pressed his lips to Bentley's head, and then moved away. His voice was still a bit thick, but it wasn't as alarming as it had been before. "Demons aren't meant to make deals so much out of their favor; it hurts them. He's been doing that a lot lately."

Bentley moved his head back, opened his aching eyes more fully. "Why?"

His father smiled. It was a tired, worn sort of smile. "Because he cares for you as a person."

"That's not why he came at first though," Bentley said, because it wasn't and it needed to be said. "He came because I'm Mizar."

Letting out a rush of air, his father leaned back on one hand to ruffle Bentley's hair. "I thought so too, but he said it was because you weren't afraid of him."

Despite himself, Bentley snorted. "Then we have very different ideas about how this started."

"That's what I said." His father's smile was a bit more genuine. "Then he told me you actually met once, in dream, when you were nine and he was still not all him. And you weren't afraid of him."

He couldn't remember it. But he remembered being nine, when all he knew was that Alcor righted wrongs, that he punished the guilty and saved the innocent. That Bentley would never have been afraid of Alcor.

That Bentley wasn't quite him anymore, though. He'd probably be afraid for a long, long time. But maybe, just maybe…

"Where's Alcor?" Bentley mumbled the question at the floor.

"Living room," His father said. There was a hand in his hair again, and after a moment, he said, "Go. I'll be here."

The 'okay' stuck at the back of his throat, and he stood. Scrubbing his eyes with the back of his sleeve, Bentley left the room and entered the hallway. It took only a few shuffling steps to arrive at the doorway to the living room.

When he peered inside, Alcor was sitting above the couch, face in his hands. He was about twenty again, but his tailcoat looked worn and the bottom of his pants were frayed. Bentley took a step into the room.

Alcor's head snapped up as he jumped. It took him a moment to register that Bentley was there, and when he did, he immediately opened his mouth. "Bentley! Are you okay? Were you crying? Do I—do I need to leave? I can leave."

Bentley shook his head. He took another step into the room, and then another, until he was a meter or so away from Alcor. He stood there, and stared.

His eyes had thick, dark bags under them, and his face shifted subtly from more defined to less. There were golden stains on his sleeves, on his shirt, and the stars fastening his tailcoat were dull. His hair was longer than usual, a little messier, and if there was anything Bentley had learned about Alcor, it was that he was a bit fussy over his appearance.

"…Bentley?" Alcor stood, his feet hovering just a few centimeters off the floor. "What's wrong?"

"I'm sorry," Bentley murmured, eyes cast aside. He wrapped his arms around himself and tried to keep himself from bawling again. "I'm sorry."

"I—it's not your fault," Alcor said. _You were wrong_ , Carmen whispered.

"I was wrong," he repeated. He had been. He had been so wrong and how could he have been so stupid? "I screwed everything up."

Alcor stepped forward, and when Bentley didn't step back or freeze up, he said, "Maybe, but so did. So did I."

Then he pulled Bentley into a hug, slow and gentle and unsure. Bentley stepped forward, and wrapped his arms around Alcor's back. He was starting to cry again.

"I am so sorry," Alcor whispered into Bentley's hair, just to the left of where his dad had pressed his face to Bentley's head. "I am so sorry, I am so sorry, you never have to forgive me but I am so sorry."

"I'm sorry too. I should have listened." Bentley reached up with his hands to smooth the back of Alcor's jacket, and Alcor's hands smoothed Bentley's hair in return. One lingered on the top of his head, and the other slid over his good shoulder, arm warm across the top of his back. Down around the bottom of his ribcage, he could feel Alcor's wings pressing in, curling around his side and to his back.

"Me too." Alcor pressed his nose to Bentley's scalp. "We should have talked. We should have tried."

"Yeah," Bentley said, that familiar choking feeling in the back of his throat. "Yeah."

They stayed that way for what felt like forever but probably wasn't. When Alcor finally withdrew from the hug, Bentley found himself missing the warmth.

"Can I—I want to show you something, if that's okay," Alcor said. "I have to go get it though."

"Okay," Bentley said. "I'll wait."

Alcor smiled, one corner of his mouth tugging up across his cheek. "Usually that's my job," he said, and then slid out of this world and into who knew where.

Letting out a huff through his nose, Bentley lowered himself onto the couch, pressing his hands into his eyes and wiping away the tears. He nestled into the corner and rested his head on the back cushions, stared at a corner in the ceiling.

Exhaustion had just started to settle in on him when Alcor pulled himself back into the physical realm, a large thick book held in his hands. The pages—actual, literal pages, things that Bentley hadn't seen outside of his father's amateur attempts at bookbinding in his younger years—were yellower than white, but they looked to be in good shape.

"What's that?" he murmured. Alcor hesitated, then sat down next to him, the book in his lap. The cover appeared hand-crafted, written in a language that Bentley could not read. It looked only vaguely familiar.

"A scrapbook," Alcor said. "One I'd forgotten for far too long. It's about—it's about Mabel."

"Oh," Bentley said. He remembered the name, but only just. "Who was…"

Alcor smiled, bitter and nostalgic at the same time. He ran his fingers down the edge of the spine, which opened from the left rather than his father's preference for the right. "Mabel made this, you know. She was my sister. The first Mizar."

Bentley was quiet as Alcor opened the cover. The first page was filled with bubbly script, mysterious in that he didn't know how to read it, but he could see that there was a hand behind it. Alcor chuckled when he read it, murmuring foreign words under his breath.

"What does it mean?" Bentley asked, peering around Alcor's arm at the words.

"She's—she's calling me a giant _nerd_. Like, it's a person who knows a lot of things and focuses on them. And she said not to become all sad and depressed and stupid. I haven't done very well at that," he said. Bentley didn't know what to say, and just watched as Alcor took in the words before turning the page.

There were two pictures on the first page. The one at the top was a group of five people: an old man in an odd red hat, a young teenager with long hair in an even odder hat, a young adult in a cap he'd seen in batball pictures, and two children, one with long hair and wearing a bright pink sweater and the other with short hair, forehead obscured by another one of those batball pictures. The last was remarkable because—

"That's…that's your Tyrone ego, right?"

Alcor opened his mouth, and closed it again. He smiled, somewhat longing. "You could say that."

Bentley frowned, and looked down at the picture, bending further over so that he could see it up close. It was Tyrone, down to the smallest details. But why would Alcor choose that form to emulate?

Alcor tapped the picture, right next to the smiling girl. "That's Mabel. And below," he moved his finger down to the next picture, in which a middle-aged woman was yanking two men closer to her in the picture—one of which, he realized, was Alcor. "That's her again, with me and Henry."

But where had Tyrone gone? While Alcor flipped the pages, laughing at memories of these strangers to Bentley, at food fights with three redheaded children ('My niblings,' he'd said, fondly), at evening drinks with the Henry ('Man, his apple cider was the best! Everybody got sloshed'), at cards with the old man ('Grunkle Stan was a cheat and you can't tell me otherwise'), at water wars with Mabel ('She always went for the eyes!'), he felt a realization dawning. The human kid from the first photo wasn't there anymore, but in all the group pictures that he wasn't, there was Alcor.

"…that was you, wasn't it?"

Alcor smiled but didn't say anything, enamored in a picture of the three redheaded children wearing odd black hats and black robes. He traced their faces, one by one.

"You were Tyrone. You were Mabel's brother."

"I've known Mabel since before the day I was born," Alcor said. He looked up from the book at last, something tight in his eyes. "She was my rock. She helped keep me…well…human."

Bentley stared at the demon, and tried to remember the Tyrone-in-the-picture's face, young and excited. He looked down at a self-portraiture of Mabel, and saw her features in Alcor's face.

Alcor extended one hand. "Hello Bentley," he said. "My name's—my name's Dipper. Dipper Pines. It's nice to finally meet you."

He looked tired and wary all at once. Bentley looked down at a picture of Alcor sprawled out on the ground with the three children, then babies, curled up against and around him. He looked up.

Bentley took Alcor's hand and shook it. "Hi Dipper."

And Alcor—Dipper—smiled, wide and toothy and full of all the joy he'd seen reflected in that scrapbook, and Bentley thought that this was something worth trying for.


End file.
